Boston Dynamics' creation is starting to
sniff out its role in the workforce: as a helpful canine that still sometimes
needs you to hold its paw.
This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos
of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding
humans and opening doors for its pals,
Boston Dynamics finally announced that
the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least.
BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know what the
hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites,
sure. But Spot is so different than robots that have come before it that
company execs are in part relying on customers to demonstrate how the machine
might actually be useful.
And now, after a few months on the job, Spot is beginning
to show how it’ll fit in the workforce. BD’s researchers have kept close tabs
on the 75 or so Spots now working at places like construction companies and
mining outfits. (Oh, and one’s with MythBuster Adam Savage for the next year.)
They’re seeing hints of a new kind of cooperation between humans and machines,
and even machines and other machines. And starting today, you can even
customize Spot to your liking—the software development kit is now publicly
available on GitHub. Robot not included, though.
As an example of how Spot can help, says Michael Perry, VP of business
development at BD, the mining industry now employs self-driving subterranean
vehicles. But if something goes awry, like a sensor malfunctions or a truck
gets hung up on a rock, the operation has to shut down so a human worker can
safely troubleshoot the problem. But with Spot, early adopters found, the human
operator can stay at a safe distance, seeing through Spot’s eyes. “It's kind of
an interesting cognitive leap to start thinking about robots mending and
minding other robots,” says Perry. “It's a little far-fetched and it'll be
interesting to see how successful these customers are with that application,
but it was certainly something that I was really surprised by.” It’s the old
robotics mantra dirty, dangerous, and dull in action:
Advanced robots like Spot can tackle jobs humans can’t. (Or shouldn’t,
really, unless you enjoy venturing into mines to get autonomous vehicles out of
subterranean trouble.)
But there remains much that Spot can’t do. BD, for
instance, hasn’t yet deployed the arm that allows the robot to open
doors—that’ll come later this year—so Spot can’t fix a problem it might find
with an autonomous mining truck. And the company has to confront the very magic
that made it famous. A running criticism is
that by viralizing slick videos of their robots pulling off amazing feats (a
humanoid robot doing backflips,
anyone?), they’re setting the public’s
expectations too high. It takes a lot of work to get those tricks
right, and what you’re not seeing are the many times the robots fail.
So BD’s researchers and execs have had to sit down with
each prospective early adopter and talk through what their needs are, and what
the robot can and can’t do for them—or whether they even need such an advanced
platform in the first place. “We really try to work with customers and our own
internal expectations to make sure that we're not tackling a sensing task that,
if you just installed a bunch of Nest cameras, you'd have the same result,”
says Perry.
World’s 1st remote brain surgery via 5G network performed in China Published time: 17 Mar, 2019 13:12 · A Chinese surgeon has performed the world’s first remote brain surgery using 5G technology, with the patient 3,000km away from the operating doctor. Dr. Ling Zhipei remotely implanted a neurostimulator into his patient’s brain on Saturday, Chinese state-run media reports . The surgeon manipulated the instruments in the Beijing-based PLAGH hospital from a clinic subsidiary on the southern Hainan island, located 3,000km away. The surgery is said to have lasted three hours and ended successfully. The patient, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is said to be feeling well after the pioneering operation. The doctor used a computer connected to the next-generation 5G network developed by Chinese tech giant Huawei. The new device enabled a near real-time connection, according to Dr. Ling. “You barely feel that the patient is 3,000 kilometers away,” he said.
Beijing Orders Alibaba To Dump Media Assets That Rival China's Propaganda Machine BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, MAR 15, 2021 - 07:30 PM Beijing is reviving its crackdown on the country's biggest tech firms, reminding the world that the CCP is still focused on neutralizing any and all threats to its control of the Chinese economy and its people. Even after amending China's official ideology to include entrepreneurs among the protected classes represented by the CCP (in addition to workers, farmers and soldiers), Beijing, with President Xi at its center, has apparently decided that Chinese tech firms won't follow the American model after all. Instead, their growth and competitive capabilities will be curtailed for the sake of stability at home. After Tencent was censured and strict new requirements were officailly imposed on Alibaba-owned Ant Group that will prevent the company from growing , the Wall Street Journal reports that next up on Beijing's to-do lis
From Amazon to Wal-Mart, digital retail is producing more jobs and higher pay Written by Mitchell Schnurman, Business columnist May 30, 2017 Retail trade is one of the biggest job sectors in America, and the vast majority of those workers still clock in at brick-and-mortar stores. But the big growth is coming from e-commerce, which happens to pay a lot better, too. This is a promising development for retail workers who worry about thousands of store closings and the march of automation. E-commerce also offers a potential antidote to years of low productivity growth and income stagnation. “If this new pattern continues, it will raise real wages across the economy and rejuvenate the middle class,” said a report by economist Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington. By his definition, e-commerce includes online shopping, mail order and warehousing. That’s a more expansive category than usual and was created to capture the growth in what M
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